Dressed to Kill

by Campbell Black

  He rose and put his arms around her. “Thanks, Mom,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

  3

  Somehow she didn’t look forward to the sessions with Elliott any more. At one time she’d found some kind of comfort, solace, in sitting in his office and opening up to him, but not now. It had something to do with Mike, his attitudes towards what he called “trick cyclists.” He had a wonderful talent for making her feel guilty about analysis. Look at these bills, he’d say. You really think you need this guy? I mean, what’s he doing for you? And what the hell is wrong with you anyhow?

  In the back of the cab she folded her hands in her lap, looking down at the skirt of her pale gray suit, the matching gloves. I don’t know what’s wrong, she thought.

  Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. I can’t define it for you, Mike, and even if I could you wouldn’t want to understand. Satisfaction. Contentment. A sense of passion. These things are missing from my life. Call it by any name you like, it comes down to a certain emptiness. A place where everything is dark, like the inside of an impossibly long tunnel. And Elliott tries to find some way to get me out of that place, that’s what he does. He listens.

  But he isn’t really helping she thought.

  What you need, Mike had said once, is a priest. A father confessor. They come cheaper.

  She stared through the window of the cab, twisting her fingers together. She wondered how many other patients began to resent their analysts, began to feel inferior and vulnerable because they’d talked too much, given away too much of themselves with wild generosity, knocked down all their own defences and barriers and received nothing in return except for empty suggestions and occasional prescriptions. You couldn’t tell with Elliott what he was thinking as he listened, whether his mind was someplace else, whether he had developed a certain professional glaze so that he could look interested when he was really dreaming of other things.

  The cab was pulling into the sidewalk now. She paid, stepped out, conscious suddenly of the immensity of the buildings around her, almost as if they seemed to leap higher and higher in the clear sunlight, thrusting upwards into the heart of the sun. She felt tiny, threatened by the massive architecture, imagining for a moment that the buildings would collapse around her. A mild form of agoraphobia, Elliot had once said. A fear of public places. She went to the private side entrance of the brownstone, glancing at the brass plate with his name on it, then pushed the wooden door open and entered the lobby. She thought: A neurotic housewife. It felt like the tag appended to the toe of a corpse in the cold room of the morgue.

  She went inside the reception room of Elliott’s office. She was perspiring a little, a thin web of sweat forming in her armpits. There was noboby at the reception desk. The receptionist’s typewriter had a black dust cover over it. The waiting room was empty. For a moment she was at a loss. The tiny missing cog in the machine: where was the girl? How would Elliott know she’d arrived if there wasn’t anyone to announce her? She looked round the room.

  A tidy stack of magazines. The polished surface of a coffee table. A couple of sofas. You could go straight through, she thought. Knock on his door, step right into the inner sanctum. Oh, shit. She gazed at the magazines. Pick one up. Read it. Wait. Something will happen sooner or later. Harper’s. Better Homes and Gardens. Something she’d never heard of before, Games. Why didn’t they ever have things like Screw or Hustler in waiting rooms? Why did they always assume you wanted to flick the pages of Harper’s and read bitchy reviews or stare at the vacuous living rooms of the ultrarich, rooms in which it was clear nobody really lived, smoked cigarettes, picked their teeth, fornicated on those deep white rugs set in front of vast unlit fireplaces?

  She didn’t hear Elliott open his door. She didn’t hear him come into the reception room.

  “Kate.”

  She turned. She wondered at the strong sense of relief she felt on seeing him. He was smiling at her. Do I depend on him as much as this? she thought. She hated the notion, beset again by a feeling of vulnerability, as though she were a thin sheet of glass he could see through at a glance.

  He said, “My receptionist is on vacation. I have to do the honors myself.” Still smiling, he turned towards the open door of his office. “I’m not very good at it,” he added.

  She followed him through. He closed the door after her. This room, she thought, this room with its comfortable chairs and its casual sense of disorder, its overwhelming familiarity—God, she disliked this room so much. She sat down, watching Elliott go around his desk to the damn rocking chair he always sat in. Maybe this is how a junkie feels about his connection, she thought. The whole love-hate deal, the sense of need struggling with the remnants of independence, self-reliance. Self-esteem, Christ. She’d opened herself up to Elliott so many times in this damn room—how could she have any self-esteem left? (He’d say, That’s confused thinking, Kate. The more you tell me, the more esteem you should feel. It takes a little courage to be honest. Or didn’t you know that?)

  Courage. She wished she had enough of it to stop coming here.

  Elliott watched her in silence for a moment. She was conscious of sunlight, sliced by the open slats of the blind, falling on his meticulous fair hair. He had a handsome face but sometimes she saw something blindingly cold in the blue eyes, something analytical and calculating. The eyes of a judge, maybe. But he’d never made any judgements of her, he’d never passed down any moral law, any code of ethical behavior. Why did she keep expecting him to?

  He picked up a silver-plated letter opener, turning it in his hands. He had good hands, she thought. Firm, long fingers, clipped nails. She couldn’t imagine him chewing on those nails. But then she couldn’t imagine him worrying over anything or slipping into anxiety. Maybe that was it, maybe that’s where her feelings lay. She looked at Elliott and what she saw was a kind of perfection, something that highlighted her own inadequacies.

  He put the letter opener down and leaned across the desk towards her. “What’s been happening since the last time we talked?” he said.

  She glanced at him, then down at her hands. Gloves—why was she wearing gloves? Nobody wore gloves these days. Elliott would think: She’s covering something up. She looked at his face, which was blurred by the stripes of sunlight.

  “Nothing much,” she said. Feeble. Weak. You can do better than that.

  Elliott smiled. “It’s funny how you always begin with that phrase. ‘Nothing much.’ Maybe you think of your visits here the way you’d think of a dentist.”

  “No—”

  “You put me in the position of having to pull teeth, Kate.”

  She got up from the chair, took off the gloves, walked to the shelves of books. She felt blank. If I say something now, she thought, it’s going to be incoherent.

  Elliott said, “How are things with Mike?”

  She shrugged. “Mike? There’s a kind of status quo.”

  “Like how?”

  “I pretend . . .”

  “Pretend what, Kate?”

  She stared at the book titles. A number of them were in German, French, Italian. Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen. Revue Française de Psychanalyse. Archivio generate di Neurologia, Psichiatría e Psicoanalisi. She had the frightening thought of millions of people all over the world being analysed in foreign languages. The Tower of Babble.

  “What do you pretend?” Elliott asked.

  “I fake orgasm. I fake tenderness. I fake love.” There, it was out in the cold now. “I fake everything, just about.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess it makes him feel good.”

  “Forget about him, Kate. What makes you feel good?”

  She went back to her chair and sat down, closing her eyes, listening to the sound of Elliott’s steady breathing, the sound of her own heartbeat. The dream, she thought. The dream makes me feel good. She said nothing for a long time. Elliott sighed.

  “You don’t have an answer for that?” he said.

  She opene
d her purse and took out a cigarette, lighting it with a lighter Thomas had given her years ago, a silver one with her initials engraved on the side. There was a clean ashtray on the table beside her chair. She watched Elliott get up and open the window slightly. Of course, the smoke bothered him. She’d forgotten how much. Why didn’t he just hang a NO SMOKING sign on the wall?

  “I shouldn’t have married him,” she said.

  “That doesn’t exactly answer my question, Kate.” He returned to his chair and rocked back and forth slowly, waiting. The chair creaked. The noise irritated her.

  “I don’t know how to answer your question,” she said.

  “Okay. Okay. Why did you marry him anyway?”

  “You get lonely,” she said. “You begin to see yourself through the eyes of other people. You look, you see a widow, you see a widow with nothing left to mourn over, you see an empty bed. I mean . . . Mike came along. He filled a gap.”

  “Was that a good enough reason?”

  “Obviously not,” she said quickly.

  She listened to the silence in the room. Elliott had stopped rocking his chair. She raised her face and looked at him and before she could stop herself she was telling him about the dream. She was telling him about the shower, the man who clamped his hand over her mouth, the gradual yielding of herself to pleasure . . . His expression didn’t change. He listened with his hands clasped on the desk in front of himself:

  “Why does he seem familiar to you, Kate?” he asked when she had stopped.

  “I don’t know . . . Maybe because I keep having the dream. Not every night. Two, maybe three times a a month. That’s all. I guess I should have mentioned it before, except it seemed so goddamn infantile.”

  “Infantile? I don’t think so. I’m interested in why he’s familiar, that’s all. I mean, does he remind you of anyone you’ve ever met?”

  “No.” She could feel it now, the direction this was taking, the suspicion she’d entertained before, but it was wrong, horrible, macabre. It was only a goddamn dream, after all.

  “Is there something, in the way he touches you?” Elliott asked. “Is there something in the way he feels, Kate?”

  “I know what you’re thinking—”

  “I’m not thinking anything.”

  She got up from her chair. “You are . . .”

  Elliott sat back again. The chair began to rock. It reminded her of an infallible clock smugly ticking seconds away. She imagined it would go on rocking even after Elliott was no longer sitting in it.

  “You’re thinking it’s Thomas, aren’t you? That’s what crossed your mind, isn’t it? You think I’m fucking a dead man in my dream, don’t you? Jesus Christ.”

  “I didn’t suggest that. You suggested it. Not me, Kate. If this man in the dream reminds you of Thomas, it’s only because the dream is compensatory. It’s your way out of the bind of the marriage. It’s your way of compensating yourself for Mike’s failure in bed. So you create a lover, a rapist, whatever. And he satisfies you. Thomas, somebody else, it doesn’t matter. It’s nothing to feel shame over—”

  “I don’t feel any fucking shame!”

  “Don’t get angry with me, Kate. Where does your anger really lie? Mmm? Where does it really lie?”

  She shut her eyes. Christ, how she could hate Elliott.

  “Maybe it lies with Mike. And with yourself. Maybe you should explain his failings to him.”

  “Tell him he stinks in bed?”

  “If you have to,” Elliott said.

  She saw him glance at his watch now. The meter was running. The time ticking away. It’s like riding in an expensive cab, she thought. And she felt even more annoyed with him.

  “There’s a wall, Kate. Mike thinks he’s satisfactory. You lead him to believe it. Unless you tell him differently, he’s going to go on believing it. And when that happens, the whole situation will deteriorate even more.”

  “Tell the truth and shame the devil,” she said.

  “Something like that.”

  “What am I supposed to do? Look into his eyes and say, know what Mike, you suck in bed? Could you do that in my position?”

  “If I had to.”

  If you had to, she thought. I can’t imagine anything in your life, Elliott, that could create adverse situations. I can’t imagine you out of control, slave to some emotion, I can’t even imagine you taking your goddamn clothes off. So what’s the big secret? I’m paying you enough; why don’t you tell me? How do I become perfect like you, shrink? Where do I get the blueprint for happiness?

  “But you don’t have to tell him quite so harshly, do you?” he asked. “You don’t have to be so crude. You could find a gentle way of letting him know that the sexual relationship is lacking.”

  The sexual relationship is lacking. How clinical. How chilly. How utterly pat. See here, Mike, you don’t fuck me well enough, so I have to get my rocks off in a dream, and the screamingly funny thing is that the guy in the dream died years ago . . .

  She looked down at the pattern of the rug. A line from some old Bob Dylan song came into her head, something that didn’t make much sense: When gravity fails and negativity won’t pull you through.

  Gravity. Negativity.

  She looked at Elliott. “Maybe it’s me. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, not Mike.”

  “What do you think could be wrong with you, Kate?”

  You name it, she thought. “I don’t know. I don’t attract him, that could be it. I’m not attractive to him.”

  “Come on,” Elliott said. “You’re off target.”

  “You think I’m attractive?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Would you want to sleep with me?”

  “Yes. In the right circumstances. You’re a very attractive woman.”

  “The right circumstances,” she said. “What would they be?”

  Elliott smiled and indicated a photograph on his desk, then reached towards it, turning it around so she could see it. His wife, naturally. Kate saw a woman with a face that was both pretty and severe; there was something tired in the faint smile that lay on her mouth, as if it were less an expression than something she’d chosen to wear for the purpose of a picture. What would it be like to be Elliott’s wife? she wondered. Did they sit up in bed at night with their Book-of-the-Month Club selections? Maybe she was more Literary Guild and he Psychology Book Club. She had a sudden picture of Bob and Emily Newhart in their TV bedroom, and she wondered if Elliott’s home life was like that sitcom and all at once she wanted to laugh.

  “I’m married,” he said. “Breach of ethics aside, why would I jeopardize my marriage, and you yours, just because we wanted a few minutes in bed? It doesn’t seem worth the risk.”

  “The question was hypothetical,” Kate said. Breach of ethics!

  “I know it was.”

  “Sometimes I don’t feel attractive . . .”

  “Then you’re underestimating your own worth, that’s all. You’ve got to open up to Mike. You’ve got to get through to him. If you don’t, I can’t see any future for the marriage.”

  She nodded. “Open up. Right. I’ll try it. I’ll try opening up.”

  “There’s no other course, you know that, don’t you?”

  She turned her gloves around in her hands. “He’s a bad listener.”

  “You’ve got to make him listen, Kate.”

  “I’ll rope him to a chair.”

  Elliott smiled. “If you have to. But when you make him understand, I think you’ll find the dreams will stop.”

  I don’t want them to stop, she thought. Don’t you see that, Elliott? I don’t want the dreams ever to stop.

  “Why don’t we make it the same time next week?” Elliott said.

  “Sure,” she said. In and out, like a bird in a cuckoo clock. And what was she left with at the end of a session? The ordeal of talking to Mike?

  He walked with her back into the reception room. He looked at his watch again. He said, “I know I’m cutt
ing this short, but I’ve got one of those dreadful professional symposiums to attend.”

  “Take it off my bill,” she said.

  He looked at her for a time in silence. She noticed a thin line of perspiration on his forehead. (My God, the good doctor sweats. He’s a human being and all the time I was under the impression he was a listening device.) He shook her hand curtly and smiled and went back inside his office.

  She walked along the corridor thinking of the time she would have to kill before the lunch date—the dreaded lunch date with Mike and Mother Frost.

  Shit. She didn’t like killing time.

  4

  Beep. Elliott. This is Bobbi. Remember me? I’ve got a new shrink now, Elliott. I don’t need you. I don’t fucking need you. He’s going to help me. Not like you. He’s called Levy. Maybe you’ve heard of him? But we’re not through yet, Elliott. I’m not finished with you yet. I took something from your office today, Elliott. Guess what? Can’t you guess, Doctor big shot shrink? Look in your bathroom. Maybe you’ll get warm.

  He had switched the tape machine off. Look in your bathroom. He had looked in the bathroom. Just before Kate Myers had come he had looked inside the medicine cabinet, staring at the shelves of drug samples, those little bottles and envelopes left by pharmaceutical salesmen. Every one a wonder drug. Variations on familiar themes—chlorpromazine, vasopressin derivatives, carbamazepine. At first he hadn’t noticed anything missing. Everything had seemed to be in its place. And then it occurred to him, the way you sometimes try to name a phrase of music that drifts through your brain, that something wasn’t in its place. Something. But what?

  The razor.

  Bobbi had taken his razor.

  He’d searched all over for it, panicked, trying to fight the sensation. But nothing. It was gone. She’d taken it. Then he’d listened to the tape again, chilled by the sound of Bobbi’s voice: I’m not finished with you yet. The words had stayed in his head all the time Kate Myers had been in the office. Poor Kate. He’d barely been able to concentrate on her problems. Even when she’d asked that strange question, would you want to sleep with me, his sense of arousal, his consciousness of her sexual being, seemed distant from himself, out of perspective, like the sensation of another man. Male analyst and female patient, he thought. A slow fuse burning, but you had to throw cold water on the spark . . . He’d make it up to Kate later, maybe with a longer session, but that wasn’t what bothered him now.